[mhd]

Once people get in there again, spamming will resume. Never mind that a lot of them are mostly in there for spamming the Google archive, not aiming at Usenet itself. Might even get them a better pagerank… I think you're actually seeing more spam in Google Groups archives than when you're getting it from real NNTP servers, as they should respond to canceling messages (and collaborate spam filtering should be pretty effective).

But few people are interested in making Usenet a better space to live in. Follow the money and look at how many sites are essentially proprietary discussion groups.